Logically ripped off

In an earlier post I argued that the purveyors of New Age mumbo-jumbo depend on logic to further their claims.  Here's an example.  Release Technique, a positive thinking product promises to show you "step by step, how to remove the negative blocks that prevent you from living a fulfilling life of ease and abundance."  The promise is a carefully formulated proposition that involves living a rewarding life, in ease and abundance, i.e. lack of want.  It also promise that "The Release Technique's Self Help Program will help you get control over your health and finances and live in certainty."  It is advertised as "the greatest advancement in the history of behavioral science.

It goes further.  It says "Many graduates have doubled and tripled their income, became a partner with their employer, climbed the corporate ladder, retired wealthy, gained a competitive edge, taken charge of their lives, overcome serious problems, gotten a clear direction in life, and achieve financial freedom. They have gone into business for themselves and are doing spectacularly well! They have moved into brand new homes and have gotten better jobs, become healthier." These are all easily verifiable criteria.

The point being that all this does not depend on abandoning the laws of logic.  On the contrary, the promises have reasonably clear truth conditions, and make claims that could be shown to be true or false, and thus depend for their very meaning and intelligibility on the existence of standard or ordinary logic.

Reasons are given for believing this technique will be effective.  A satisfied customer writes "This is my first encounter with the Release Technique. I feel I have gained a lot from this course, I became aware I had a lot of my hidden agendas, negative thoughts and beliefs that were running my life. As I was releasing, I got more clear and light, feeling more relaxed and more quiet, more peaceful and more serene. I received $425,000 since using the method. Thank you, thank you."  This is a standard part of the scientific method.  Always question the claims being made, and seek evidence of their truth (in this case, the evidence being a customer statement of having made $425,000).

This all justifies our going to the check-out counter here and forking out $279. Though I don't recommend going any further, folks, given what it says in Ripoff Report here.

The point is, scammers rely on ordinary logic to make their claims, and to back them up.  Warning: check the soundness, as well as the validity of their arguments.  A valid argument is one whose premisses cannot be true with the conclusion false.  It can be valid even when the premisses are false.  A sound argument, by contrast, is a valid argument with true premisses.  If you are going to part with $279, go for soundness every time.

Bad music: unreasonable music

As it's been a bit of a New Age week here at Beyond Necessity, and because it's Friday, when we venture into the world of strange and bad music, here is some music people were simply too wasted to get anything right*. We'll start with the 13th Floor Elevators, 60s psychedelic band and stoner heroes.

Ex-bandsman Tommy Hall is on the right, a 66 year old who has spent most of his life dropping acid. "We were trying to get into the results of acid," he says, "to get into the results of the universe." So he made it a rule to drop acid every time someone picked up an instrument. As the  interview says, "it's challenging to comprehend everything he's saying". Why would that be. Hall wrote the sleeve notes for The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators, their 1966 album, urging everyone to get away from that boring and narrow old Aristotelian logic.

Actually some of their music does anticipate the music of the 1970s, but not Don't Fall Down, which sounds terrible even if you are very stoned.  This is proof that 'psychedelic drugs' damage the rational parts of the mind.

Moving, on here is Journey by Gentle People, which actually managed 21,000 views.  The original is actually 15 minutes long but that wouldn't fit onto YouTube, which is just as well.  I already pointed out that marijuana destroys the short-term memory, which has a bad effect on logic, but also music, where you get stuck at the repeat bar :|| for ages, similar to driving round Swindon.

Finally something more modern and rappy.  "5 weed songs", of which I only got past the first, and Cypress Hill performing Stoned Is The Way Of The Walk.  Note the endless repetition of the initial motif, supposedly sampled from Grant Green's Down on the Ground, which is also very bad.

*Yes there is something wrong with that sentence.

Non-Aristotelian states of consciousness

I have been following up Dr. Pamela Gerloff’s post about the ‘Possiblity Paradigm’ with a few comments of my own, most of them on this page. I pointed out a number of logical flaws in her argument, and she has finally replied exactly as I thought she eventually would, by saying “From within your paradigm it appears to be gobbledlygook, and full of logical inconsistences. That's correct, when perceived from within your paradigm,” and “You are trying to understand what I'm saying from within your philosopher/logician's thought framework/paradigm.”

This is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for the purveyor of New Age mumbo-jumbo. If you try to point out any flaw in their reasoning whatsoever, they will simply reply that the flaw is from your ‘logical’ standpoint or ‘paradigm’. It is a limitation of your mind constrained by ordinary logic. And of course there is no reply to that. If your opponent in argumentation refuses to abide by the rules of logic, the argument is over. Except to note that New Ageists nearly always use ‘ordinary’ logic to put forward their arguments. In her original post, Gerloff claims that Lester Levenson exists, and backs up her claim by saying she knows former students of his, which is an obvious appeal to standard scientific reasoning (give evidence). She cites evidence that Lester recovered from apparently incurable cancer as reason for believing the more extraordinary claims, such as being able to withstand nuclear blasts by the power of thought. So she is trying to persuade us using ordinary logic as a first step. Yet as soon as we question her second step, she explains that ‘ordinary’ logic fails. But if that were true, the first step would fail. This is inconsistent.

This reminds me so much of the 1960s and 70s. The 13th Floor Elevators were a 60s band who advocated chemical agents (such as acid and weed) as a gateway to a higher, 'non-Aristotelian' state of consciousness, which would transcend ordinary ‘Aristotelian logic’. I remember many conversations, or what passed for conversations with the smokers of weed and the herb where this very same argument was propounded. Not really arguments, of course. Any substantial logical point was met with that irritating condescending smile of the weeder who is already at the ‘higher state of consciousness’. “You simply don’t understand, man”. The fact being, of course, that marijuana blocks all short-term memory so effectively that any movement from premisses to conclusion – which requires remembering what the premisses were – is impossible.